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(I wrote this in notepad so sorry if the layout is weird)
GUILT
"Thomas?" I groaned as I woke up. I noticed my husband Thomas Sharp was not next to me. I let out a sad sigh. I knew most likely where my poor husband was
I climbed out of bed and wrapped my self in my dressing robe, it was so chilly now that the fire place in our bedroom was all but out, just a few glowing embers
glowed in the pile of ash. I pulled the gown over my shoulders and tied the sash around my waist, making sure it was secure. I slipped on my silk slippers and then
left the bedroom to look for Thomas
"Thomas" I whispered in the dimly lit halls. I was only using a candle. I did not want to wake the sleeping household up by switching on the lights
I quickly and quietly peaked in on our house maid and only member of staff, Maisy. Sure she was hired here and we her employers, but me and Thomas considered her like a daughter. She was curled up in her bed fast asleep. Good. I had not woken her
I made it to the top of the stairs and noticed a warm, orange glow coming from the living room. There he was, just like I suspected
I walked quietly downstairs and to the living room entrance. I stood there and saw him, he was facing away from me. He was sat on the sofa looking into the roaring
fire that was burning in the living room fire place. Thomas turned his head and looked at me standing in the doorway of our living room, but then turned back to looking
at the flames
My poor darling. He was torturing himself
I made my way over him and sat down quietly beside him
I was quite for a while and just looked at him looking at the fire. It was not the first time I had found him like this in the middle of the night
Sometimes the ghosts of his past got the better of him
I finally spoke as I shifted closer to my husband "My love, it's late and cold. Come back to bed"
Thomas turned and smiled at me sadly, his eyes were glassy with tears "What have I done to deserve you?" he asked. It was not rhetorical. He was genuinely asking me
"Thomas?" I asked confused as I brought my feet up and got even closer to Thomas. I was practically in his lap
"I'm a monster Y/N. But I have you. Why?"
I cupped his face and forced him to look at me
"You listen to me Thomas Sharp and you listen good. You are not a monster"
"But I'm"
"No" I said knowing what he was going to say "You are not a monster"
"I've killed, I lured those women all for their money, I poisoned them and above all I was sleeping with my own sister"
"Thomas. I will admit you have done some bad things in your life but you are not a murderer. It was her. It was Lucille that was the one holding the knife. She
manipulated you made you think it was her way and no other way to survive. That you had no choice in life, that you were not your own man. That without her that
you would shrivel up and die. And as for love. She made you think that nobody could love you but her. Always together, never apart"
Thomas stared into my eyes and carefully listen to me
"But my love you are your own man, you are free my darling to do and love as you wish. You are a brilliant, bright man Thomas Sharp. You are a free man"
Sometimes, less so now over the short years since we have been married and the events he left back in England. I'd tell this to him. I could not blame him that he needed to hear the words I
said to him. For I was telling the truth the whole honest truth. And I would tell him over and over again to sooth my poor husbands heart and soul
My darling. How much the guilt weighed on him. Like he was carrying a anvil around constantly on his back
Before he met and married me and settled to our happy, quite life in Upstate New York. He was a deeply troubled man
But who could blame him for feeling so guilty. After the horrible hand that life decided to deal him. He must have thought his birth was a cursed one, it sounded like his
mother thought it was. A often absent and abusive father a bitter and also abusive mother, who locked both him and his sister in the attic like they were a dirty secret. The
beating she dished out on them. One redeeming thing I could find in his sister Lucille. She took most of his mothers cane to save him
His sister. Lucille.
A part of me wanted to feel sorry for her, for she shared that awful exitance in the dreadful house along side him
But it was her that was the butcher of Thomas's previous wives. She laced the tea with posion most times and watched as the poor, unsuspecting woman swallowed it. Finding
out much too late that, that is what was making them so ill. But posion was not the method that her victims left this world
There was a beast inside Lucille. One wife had her head bashed in. One she strangled with her bare hands. Both she removed the rings fingers of to get back her mothers ring.
His last wife before Edith, the one who got away. Was presumed poisoned. They were not her only victims. She killed her baby, the one she had with Thomas. Smothered or
poisoned. But I thought that was a mercy killing, the infant was not born right and would not likely live long, and would have been in great pain. Her final two killings in her life
were her own mother in the bathtub with a meat cleaver, I could not say I felt sorry for her. And Edith's own father. She bashed his head repeatedly on the bathroom sink and left him on the floor to be found, his blood swirling down the floor drain
It was no wonder Allerdale Hall was considered haunted. Such violent and gruesome deaths. Being married to a Sharp was like being a lamb lead to the slaughter
What scared me most was not the number and motives, nor the fact that when she was done disposing them after they have outlived their usefulness. Her and Thomas hid their crimes by
dumping the poor women in the vats of scarlet clay that were below the house. What terrified me the most about Lucille was the fact that she could take a human life. And in such
barbaric ways. She must have had the strength of ten men. She caved in a full grown man's skull like it was a melon
It chilled me to the bone.
It was a wonder how my husband was not as sick and twisted as his sister was. He did bad things, but not to the extent of his sister. It seems to me he was the bait, the lure
And Lucille was the knife that ended them. There was a good man in my Thomas that was finally free when his sister was killed by Edith.
He spent years and years being suffocated by her, hurt by her. She stabbed him in the chest twice in a jealous rage but missed anything vital. Thomas stopped her before she could kill him
He got away. He had to except the fact that he had lost Edith, she would never love or trust him again. He helped her and her Doctor friend to freedom and safety, before running himself for if he had not the police would have had one for the rope. And I would not be so happy with the man my Thomas was now
"You are not a monster my love. You are a man. You admit your wrong doing and feel guilt and remorse for them. Someone with no soul would not, you do. You can be redeemed my love if only you let it"
"My darling, my angel" Thomas said cupping my face pulling me in for a kiss, his face was damp with tears "I love you so"
"I love you too. Now lets go back to bed"
Thomas and I rose from the sofa and began to walk up the stairs back to our warm bed
He was not a monster. He just needed to heat that sometimes